Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses materialities of resistance in a Black rural community (quilombo) in Maranhão, Brazil. Drum beating and singing, as part of a religious festivity, will be examined as privileged forms of performing popular Catholic resistance to Pentecostal Christianity in the region.

Paper long abstract:

Challenging the collective way quilombolas -the residents of Black rural communities called quilombos- use land and natural resources, the growing presence of Pentecostal Christians is creating tensions that intimately entwine religious faith with land use. The Catholic majority of those villages communities, opposes the way converts renounce the collective way of occupying land by privately appropriating plots. While this discontent remains largely tacit, it acquires voice, sound, and physical shape in the annual, weeks-long, celebrations for the local patron-saint.

Walking through the area Catholics regard as property of the saint, and which comprises 40 village communities, the devotees carry a small figurine of Santa Teresa. While visiting each and every one of these quilombos they beat the drums of Santa Teresa and sing ditties dedicated to her.

Drum beating is a symbolic gesture that is powerfully perceived by those to whom the message is intended. An instrument widely known to be strongly disliked by Pentecostals but essential to the festa, as well as to what has come to be considered 'Black' and 'quilombo cultural heritage', the drum assumes a central and symbolic role in aggregating the Catholic community across the different quilombos, while alienating Pentecostals. Filling the space with their controversial sound, the drums of Santa Teresa become 'the authentic sound of the dispossessed … their way of saying, "I'm here, I exist, I won't be ignored"' (Hendy 2014: 143). This paper will explore some of the ways quilombola discontent is visibly and audibly manifested during this Catholic celebration.

Paper short abstract:

Brazilian music and dance is performed and listened to in multiple settings in Lebanon today. Using findings from recently conducted field research, I shall examine how this music occupies a unique, ambivalent and sometimes contested space in the Lebanese musical milieu.

Paper long abstract:

Since the first Lebanese migrants arrived in Brazil in the late 19th century, Lebanon and

Brazil have shared a rich history of trade and cultural exchange. Transnational migration has

resulted in a small but significant Brazilian population in Lebanon, which currently numbers

approximately 17,000.

The first encounter with Brazilian music for many Lebanese came in the 1970s, via the bossa

nova-influenced compositions of Ziad Rahbani, and the cover versions of Antonio Carlos

Jobim sung by Rahbani's mother, the iconic singer Fairouz. Today, Brazilian music and dance is practised, performed and listened to in multiple settings, from independent music venues to corporate events and weddings.

Using findings from recently conducted field research in Lebanon, I shall examine how the

performance of Brazilian music and dance by both Brazilian and non-Brazilian performers occupies a unique, ambivalent and sometimes contested space in the Lebanese musical milieu. I will demonstrate how the economics and politics of both independent music scene(s) and the corporate 'gig economy' intersect with broader issues of cultural conservatism, exoticism and stereotyping, resulting in both highly Tropicalist representations of Brazilian culture and the practice of autoexoticism by the performers themselves. Additionally, I shall address how the performance of Brazilian music and dance illuminates anxieties surrounding the dancing female body, as well as how societal attitudes concerning gender and race affect and shape the production, performance and reception of Brazilian music in Lebanon.

Paper short abstract:

This paper argues against scholarship that suggests that musicians servicing Mexican narcos have little agency due to the dangers of challenging orders. It interrogates how rappers shape narco aesthetics, emotions and masculinities in songs directly commissioned for and about Mexican narcos.

Paper long abstract:

Scholarship suggests that musicians servicing Mexican narcos have little agency due to the dangers of challenging orders. Short-term fieldwork with an ex-narco and rappers who willingly write commissioned narco music in Tamaulipas, Mexico, suggest that many rappers exert power creatively, despite the risks. In this paper, I explore how rappers shape narco aesthetics, masculinities and emotions. I argue that narco rap songs promote an ethics that goes beyond bravado and hedonism. Hyper- and vulnerable narco masculinities are entangled in these songs, where men have romantic outpourings, shed tears in mourning, and tremble in shoot-outs. Narco rap serves to reassure narcos that the emotional and physical traumas of engaging in armed warfare are manageable; encourage a work ethic of being astute, loyal and firm; and affirm that redemption is possible. Yet within the scope of vulnerable narco masculinities, only certain feelings and sensations are embraced. Mourning, for example, is signaled mostly as a means of remembering, rather than a traumatic process. Crucially, the agony of physical suffering and death are absent in these songs. Instead, narco rap provides assurance that respect, belonging and salvation are achievable, whatever atrocities narcos commit and however scared they may be. More broadly, my concern is to interrogate the humanity of narcos, arguing against prevalent discursive us-them dichotomies that facilitate Othering and stigmatisation of actors in the narco-world, and serve to accentuate narco-power.

Paper short abstract:

This paper considers complex emotional dynamics in the musical lives of asylum seekers and the significance of these resonances in their songs as they navigate the structural constraints of mobility and immobility together with profound emotional effects of dislocation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers complex emotional dynamics in the musical lives of asylum seekers and the significance of these resonances in their songs as they navigate the structural constraints of mobility and immobility, together with profound emotional effects of dislocation. I analyse musical journeys of emotion as modes of resistance and resilience to oppression and consider how trauma, grief and pain can become tools to humanize the 'empty spaces' of new worlds through a strategic reorientation of kinaesthetic and imaginative empathy. I analyse how recounting painful journeys immerses singers and listeners in visceral recognition of events that have the power to animate the 'empty space' of the singer's displacement. In turn, these movements simultaneously afford opportunities for 'a new human sociality' of open-ended dialogue and polyphony 'centred around, rather than built over against, the victim' (Alison 1998: 307). In this empathic process, I will analyse how singers express emotional transitions from narrative to the poetics of song and consider the ways in which journeying facilitates a transformation of recognition that both enlivens 'the Other' inviting moral action and reaction. Through empathic listening to the vulnerability of these musicians, their songs have become a powerful medium of validation that is both highly personal and intimately public. In turn, listeners become entailed in processes of interdependency with the capacity to empower further recognition of these musicians who are coping with fragile senses of liminality.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the differences and similarities between the war music and rituals of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, and, the engagement of Iran in the war in Syria since 2010. It takes an alternative perspective in focusing on the creativity and emotions of religious beliefs.

Paper long abstract:

The paper compares the emotional constitutive force in mobilisation of forces for the defence against the Iraqi invasion of Iran in the 1980s and the looser fabrication of a resistance discourse in engagement of Iranian forces in Syria since 2010. It accounts for a dramatic shift from a popular active resistance of volunteer forces and artists, towards a marginalised state sanctioned passive resistance. Close observations of the musical and religious rituals at the moment reveals a dilemma of a gap in cultural hegemony of the state over engaging the popular culture with the culture of those volunteering for the Syria that is totally in contrast with the emotional empowerment of the masses during the 1980s.

The paper assesses the music and religious rituals of the war in the 1980s as an active practice of resilience that stems through a serene characteristics of the honest Iranian forces and artists in comparison with a diluted and distorted top-down state sanctioned cultural creative force behind the music of the Syria wars. It would also eventually illuminate how the political negativity and antagonism since 1979 - and more effectively from 1989 - have effectively drained the creativity and honest emotional engagement of the artists with the state. In addition, it reveals how the politics of emotions works for the current volunteer forces in their own understandings once the productions shifts from eulogising the leaders and the commanders towards a narrative of the volunteers themselves, that is closer to the 1980s.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the relationship between musical engagement, group identity creation, maintenance and challenges and group resilience and resistance.

Paper long abstract:

The resilience of group identity can be considered a vital component of peacebuilding efforts and of understanding conflict. As such, this resilience is a factor in social change or status quo maintenance. A group cannot maintain hegemonic control in an area where their own identity is not resilient nor can a subaltern group engage with resistance to hegemonic control without a resilient identity. Musical activities have been demonstrated to build, enhance and bolster group identities, as well as challenge them. This paper argues, therefore, that music has played a key role in group resilience through identity maintenance for both groups wishing to maintain the status quo in power relationships and for those who wish to resist and challenge the status quo. This paper builds upon the recent scholarship in music sociology (Lidskog 2016; Farzana 2017) and post-colonial theory (Lovesey 2017; Kanaaneh et al 2013) to suggest how musical engagement develops, maintains, and challenges group identity for these purposes, often simultaneously.

Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the intersection between everyday life and critical geopolitics, examining the ways in which intercultural and interfaith performing arts practices are functionalised to challenge narratives of fear and facilitate transformative empathy.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers the intersection between everyday life and critical geopolitics, drawing attention to the agency with which individuals respond to global and local fear. In particular, intercultural and interfaith performing arts practices will be presented as spaces that facilitate the galvanisation of emotions. Data drawn from interviews with, and observations of, community musicians and performance poets in Melbourne, Australia, will provide empirical evidence of the performativity of emotions and how music and spoken word is used to construct affective states, towards inspiring change. In line with the 'new geopolitics of fear', the participants from this qualitative ethnographic study provide insight into how the current climate of fear is experienced by marginalised minority groups, and the ways in which they use performing arts platforms to challenge the narratives which demonise them.

By focussing on intercommunity arts practices, this paper also considers the processes through which empathetic engagement across ethnocultural, linguistic and religious boundaries is felt and mobilised. Through analysing the integration of different emotional styles in the fusion of distinct and seemingly dissonant traditional music practices, this paper explores the transformative potential of empathy. Importantly, the practices that will be discussed move beyond hierarchical empathiser-sufferer dynamics, in which empathy becomes an intercultural relations skill with market value and the extension of compassion can be indicative of privilege. The intercommunity arts discussed here exemplify mechanisms for empathy between peers who, in traditional narratives of social justice, might occupy more fixed positions as the objects of empathy.